John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

Hello,

I am just wondering if there are any comments, tips, constructive feedback on this design before I start construction in three weeks. All room-within-room.



Control Room Size: 4.03m (W) x 5.830m (L) x 2.5m (H)
Live Room: 5.44m (W) x 8.03m (L) x 2.8m (H)
Vocal Booth: 1.18 (W) x 2.24 (L) x 2.5 (H)
Guitar Teaching Room: 1.83 (W) x 4.25 (L)

The Vocal booth will be inside out construction. The outside wall of the control room (near vocal booth will be covered with fabric to keep as two leaves).


I am not sure what to do about the back wall of the control room. At the moment in this design I have the back control room wall as a single-leaf with two 16mm on either side. Is this really illogical? Will the drums from my live room really penetrate through their leaf, all the airgaps filled with insulation and bleed through the back wall of my control room with two 16mm on each side?

The main issue I have with this is there is a massive beam behind my control room wall running up the side walls across the roof and down the other side wall. If I had to build a second wall I would have to shift the control room forward and make my live room smaller again.

I don't know.. this whole leaf thing is killing my brain. How much isolation do I really need. Freakin leaves.

Another question.
Unless I'm making a super door like in Rod's book I will need two doors on every frame, is that correct. At the entrance of the live room I want to put in a sliding glass door. Will I need two glass sliding doors? How thick? One on each frame? Or I could potentially put 1 sliding glass door and 1 set of double doors. So many doors.

Windows for control room are going to be 10mm and 12.35mm Laminated Glass. 1500mm (L), 900mm (L) to live room. and I haven't completely worked out what size for the vocal booth.

Does my couch have to be central? I'm thinking of building a riser for this like in lillith envy's build. Her's looks killer with the lights in the bottom.

I'm thinking of running,
16 input XLR to live room WALL PLATE 1
4 XLR Outputs, 4 TRS, 2 Speaker GUITAR CAB, 1 RCA to live room WALL PLATE 2
4 Cat 5, 1 HDMI, 1 Firewire, 1 USB to live room WALL PLATE 3
2 XLR, 1 Cat 5 to vocal booth WALL PLATE 4
Any thoughts?

I will have to put aircon return vents in the live room.

What is the best way to get air into the vocal booth?
I have HVAC ducting servicing all other spaces except I need to put a return air duct in the live room.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17632 this is a link to my first thread.

It doesn't show it in my plan but ceiling will be two layers of 16mm gyprock.

Thanks,
Sam

You did it all wrong! You have to start over!!!... Just kidding. The basic idea is much better. But there's still a few suggestions on how to improve it.

Nice ratio. Smooth modal distribution. There shouldn't be any problems from that point of view. The total size and volume are also good.

Yes, but your isolation is incomplete. The inner leaves look fine all around (with some details: see below), but the outer leaf is not complete around the vocal booth and that side of the control room. That needs to be fixed! You need to add a leaf across the whit space, right where the "1182.0mm" dimension is, plus another section at right angles to that, running parallel to the side wall of the CR, right through the word "storage", and meeting up with the outer leaf of the rear wall. That will complete your outer leaf.

That's actually a coupled two-leaf, not a single leaf. You have drywall - air gap - drywall, so you have mass-spring-mass: it is two leaf, just not decoupled.

It's not illogical: it's just not done correctly, and is not complete. See below.

From the live room? Probably not (assuming that you complete the outer leaf properly! : ), but when you play back those drums on the monitors in the control room, then they will be heard on the "living area", since your rear wall is not decoupled. Let's say you play back drums at 95 dB in the CR. That rear wall is going to give you maybe 40-something dB of isolation. Let's be generous and call it 45. So your drums will still be audible at 55 dB in the living area: that's pretty loud. And since that wall is not decoupled, a lot of that will be in the low frequency region, which is the most annoying.

But the real issue here is the incomplete outer leaf: It might just be a mistake on the drawing, but there are several places where there are gaps in the outer leaf. For example, here:




And here:




Those need to be fixed!

TIt isn't marked on your SketchUp, so it is difficult to figure out where and how it would interfere.

One things you could do on that rear wall, is to put RC on the "living area" side, and put the drywall on that. That will decouple that side, and make it into a true fully-decoupled MSM system, for much better isolation.

Probably not. The way you describe it, it seems to be a frame, consisting of two pillars and a beam. You could attach your outer-leaf drywall directly to that, and build inner leaf with soffits around the pillars. But without seeing it in 3D on the SketchUp model, it's hard to say what can and cannot be done.

I'd suggest that it is time to turn your 2D plan into 3D, and start fleshing out all these details, so we can see better what is going on.

Exactly: one on each leaf.

Yes, two doors, one on each frame, "back to back". The thickness of the glass should be correct to maintain the surface density of the rest of the wall. Since glass is about 3 to 4 times the density of drywall, you need glass that is about one third the total thickness of all the drywall on the leaf. For example, if you have two layers of 16mm drywall on each leaf, for a total of 32 mm on each leaf, then you need glass that is at least 10 mm thick, on each leaf. That means you have the same surface density (roughly 24 kg/m2) across the entire leaf. You therefore also need at least the same air depth between the two glass doors. In fact, you need a greater air depth, since you obviously won't have insulation in the gap between the doors, but you will have it in the gap between the drywall, so theoretically you need to have a gap between the glass that is 1.4 times the size of the gap between the drywall. So, for example, if you had calculated that you need a 10 cm air gap for your walls, then you need a 14 cm gap between the glass panes for those doors. (The reason is simply that, for rather complex reasons, the insulation in the walls "appears" to make the gap about 1.4 times deeper, as far as the sound waves are concerned: they "think" they are traveling through a gap 1.4 times greater than it really is.)

You COULD do double doors, but there's a major issue there with how you achieve a seal where the two doors meet in the middle. Besides, if you have one sliding glass door in the inner leaf, then why would you put double doors opposite that int he outer leaf? The big advantage of sliding glass doors is the excellent visibility, but if you put double doors on the other side, then all you see is the double doors! Also, since the actual opening in the sliding glass is only one half total width (you can only open one side at a time!), then it doesn't make much sense to put double doors on the other side.

But the big issue is seals: air-tight seals around all doors is critical to good isolation. Both leaves must be sealed air-tight. That's already hard to do on single doors, even harder on sliding glass doors, and practically impossible in double doors. Where the two doors meet in the middle, there is nothing solid to attach the seals to. There is no frame there: just two door edges meeting. Getting a seal to work there is going to be really tough.

That's going to be expensive! Do you really need them that big? Maybe you do, for sight lines, but if you can figure out a way of making them smaller, then that would save you money. Thick laminate glass is not cheap.

Not really. It would be better to have it centered if possible, but it's not critical, since it is behind you. Symmetry in the front of the room is absolutely critical, and it seems you have that under control, but it's not so important for the rear, so if you need to offset your sofa a bit to the left or right, that shouldn't be a big issue.

You need HVAC in all the rooms! It would be good to show the details of that in your SketchUp model, including the silencer boxes and duct routing. Those are really important.

You could probably just run branch ducts there from either the control room or the live room, using suitable silencer boxes to maintain the isolation.

Just checking here: So each ceiling is going to be supported independently for each room? In other words, the ceiling on the live room will rest ONLY on the inner-leaf walls for the live room, not touching the outer leaf, and the ceiling for the control room will ONLY rest on the control room inner-leaf walls, not touching the outer leaf or the ceiling for the live room? Ditto for the booth? Those are also major issues that are not shown on your sketchup.

I would really suggest that you should turn your SketchUp floor plan into a proper 3D model, showing all of the details, including the existing structure, the proposed new structures, doors, windows, HVAC, etc.

It's hard to get an idea of what you have from just looking at a 2D rough sketch, and a text description.

One other things I noticed: your CR geometry. You have the apex of the speaker-head triangle in the middle of your head, meaning that the speakers are aimed at your eyes, not your ears! The apex should be at a point a few cm behind your head, so that the speakers are pointing at your ears.

Also, with the current layout, the window to the booth seems to be at the first reflection point for both speakers...

- Stuart -

_________________
I want this studio to amaze people. "That'll do" doesn't amaze people.

Hello,

I had some problems with my other account 'sammytwright'. I tried to change my email for the account and I never got the activation email to the account or I wrote my email in wrongly or something. I wasn't sure how to sort it out...pretty nooby.

Anyways. I have edited the floor plan and have posted that just to check that this is what you mean soundman.



If this is the right idea I will flesh it out in 3D

There is existing ducting that will access all rooms (except vocal booth). There is only one return air vent is over where the control room will be, however I will have to put in some more fresh air ventilation in the other rooms. and a split system in the living area.

Thanks
Sam Wright

Bump

Soundman? Anyone? Is this right. I get back to town on Friday and am going to start the framing on Saturday, so I'm really hoping someone could please inform me if this correct
Thanks, Sam

Hi Sam! Sorry about the delay: lots of stuff going on here, all at once...

That new one is mostly OK, but you still need to complete the outer leaf down the right wall of the studio, right where the word "storage" is. You could either do that with another set of framing that joins up with the new wall that you added to the vocal booth, or maybe with RC along the existing wall.

Everything else looks fine.

- Stuart -

_________________
I want this studio to amaze people. "That'll do" doesn't amaze people.